htbrown Loc: San Francisco Bay Area

One of my favorite science fiction stories (from the 1970s) was about how scinetists manages to fit all the world's information onto the tiniest of chips - and then they lost it.

Tronjo Loc: Canada, BC

Only few realize that all this miniaturization was made possible by the invention of the laser, maybe the greatest invention of the last century.

ole sarg Loc: south florida

How is it put on such a small chip? The chinese have small hands!

RichardSM Loc: Back in Texas

B/S Larry we the people of of the world have gained a lot if you bothered to look I’ll bet a lot of your appliances in your home have lots of technology in it because of going to space.

WB9DDF Loc: Knoxville, IL

Arthur C. Clark came up with the answer. He wrote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

ToBoldlyGo Loc: London U.K.

Sorry, but some of the posts here make little sense. Please guys, read it through before you post. Thanks.

cambriaman Loc: Central CA Coast

Ones and zeroes have no dimension. The storage devices continue to shrink. The computer I used at USC for my MSEE program was the size of three SubZero refrigerators and had all the capability of a hand calculator (which didn't exist then). We had to work in a 50 degree room on a keyboard mounted on the mainframe cabinet. Times they are a changin' and will continue to do so.....as long as ones and zeroes are still states of charge.

Cheese

But aren't we missing the big picture? If tiny SD cards are replacing larger film spools, why is the typical DSLRs body significantly chunkier than the typical SLR body?

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

And they are not done making things even smaller. Flash memory is going to 3D where cells are stacked above each other on the die. And they are stacking die.

And the memory is still getting faster too.

Star Trek here we come!
.

wrangler5 Loc: Missouri

Perhaps because the typical SLR body doesn't have the equivalent of a darkroom and image projector built in?

I switched from film to digital in 2002 after going to a 2-weekend horse show that my daughter was competing in. First weekend I took my usual film SLR (Nikon F100, IIRC - most useful Nikon I ever owned, and I started with an FTn in 1970) and came home with the usual 20-25 rolls of B&W film, which took the rest of the nights in the week to develop, dry, cut, file in sleeves and print contact sheets for future reference. The second weekend I rented a Canon DSLR outfit from my full service camera store (they didn't have Nikon equipment for rent). I had done the necessary research to have image viewing and organizing software on a laptop computer that went along for the weekend. After I came back to the motel at the end of the first day of digital shooting and had contact sheets in the computer in about 30 minutes, just waiting to be printed when we got home, I never took another frame of film.

I don't remember the Canon EOS D30 being significantly larger than the Nikon F100. But its functionality was so vastly superior (for my purposes) to the film/wet development/contact print process I had been using before that I didn't care about size. It fit in about the same size camera case, and that was enough.

pendennis

And Moore's law is really "retroactive"; technology itself has been advancing at that rate since the dawn of the 20th Century. Flight, medicine, telecommunications; all have experienced similar growth.

Cheese

So we are miniaturizing the SD card but having to lug around a darkroom and image projector. After which we come home to a second "darkroom" (LR/PS) to get the final product.

Progress?

wrangler5 Loc: Missouri

It's progress for my purposes. My first DSLR (Nikon D100) took something like 5 seconds to save a 6Mb RAW file to the physically large (compared to SD) CF card that held up to 512Mb, or so, and the camera was locked up while the file was writing. My current Olympus OMD EM1 MkII writes ~20Mb RAW files to the tiny 64GB SD card as fast as I can push the shutter button. In film terms it's like going from a single reel developing tank to a multi-roll continuous processing machine. If the camera had to get a bit bigger to do that, so be it, as long as things I need to carry continue to fit in a "normal" camera bag (although in fact the micro-4/3ds equipment is smaller and lighter than either the DX or FX bodies and lenses I have in the Nikon system.)

ToBoldlyGo Loc: London U.K.

How is it not?

Cheese

TVs, desktops, laptops, cellphones, watches, speakers, all added tons of features in the digital age, yet got smaller.

Cameras got chunkier.